Moxon Architects photographs Barking Riverside station at dusk, its metal screen catching a warm orange light while the square in front of it remains almost theatrically clear. It is a handsome London Overground terminus, clean, accessible and oddly expectant. I am used to railway buildings carrying the grime of the place they serve. This one seems to be waiting for the place to catch up.

The station opened to passengers on 18 July 2022. Barking Riverside Limited, the developer, describes an extension of 4.5km from the Gospel Oak to Barking line, arriving in a new public square with the Thames riverfront five minutes away. That wording is cheerful and quite precise. A station is usually sold as a way out: a short walk from home to a train, a reduction in the indignity of the commute. Here it is also a way in, an entrance provided before the district has settled into whatever ordinary habits will eventually define it.

Moxon's account of the design makes this feeling structural. Designed with Atkins and Burns & Nice, the station folds its working rooms into the footprint of the viaduct: ticket office at ground level, platforms overhead, an outer skin of stainless-steel panels moving from solid to perforated. Trains do not simply pull into a platform. They approach through a screened object that gradually admits movement, people and light. It is a threshold with an unusually confident idea of what lies on both sides.

Most haunted infrastructure has suffered a withdrawal. A pier has lost its steamers; an underpass has lost the precinct it was meant to feed. I recently wrote about a bus shelter standing after its last bus, the small cruelty of a public promise surviving after its timetable has gone. Barking Riverside is the inverse problem. The service is present. The square and interchange are present. What has not yet acquired a fixed shape is the life that makes a terminus feel inevitable rather than provisional.

I do not mean that the neighbourhood is vacant, or that a new railway is some melancholy mistake. That would be an easy aesthetic lie, the kind made by anyone who prefers a photograph of an empty platform to the inconvenient fact of people needing homes and transport. The developer's account of the opening is properly pleased with itself: trains running, buses connecting, river services close by, the journey to Barking compressed. This is infrastructure doing the decent thing and arriving early.

Early still has a strange atmosphere. Somewhere in east London there is a terminal destination on a departure board whose name sounds both settled and conditional. Barking Riverside. Not an old town absorbed by the railway, not a demolished works remembered by a branch line, but a name rehearsed aloud by automated announcements until daily life grows around it. Children will eventually regard the stainless-steel screens and the raised platforms as boring local facts. That is the desired result, and it requires an interval in which the future has opened its station but has not stopped looking like a rendering.

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